Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Correcting the Colors on Your Screen

You want your photos to look as good as possible and to have beautiful, breathtaking color, right? That’s probably one of the reasons you bought Elements. But now that you’ve got the program, you’re having a little trouble getting things to look the way you want. Do either of these situations sound familiar?

• Your photos look great onscreen but your prints are washed out, too dark, or the colors are all a little wrong.

• Your photos look just fine in other programs like Word or Windows Explorer, but they look just awful in Elements.

To paraphrase that old romantic chestnut: It’s not you, it’s Elements. As a color-managed program, Elements uses your monitor for guidance when displaying the colors in your photos. Most programs pay no attention to what your monitor thinks, but a color-managed application like Elements relies on the profile—the information your computer stores about your monitor’s settings—when it decides how to print or display a photo onscreen. If that profile isn’t accurate, then neither is the color in Elements.

TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENTDust and Scratches

Scratched, dusty prints can create giant headaches when you scan them. Cleaning your scanner’s glass helps, but lots of photos come with plenty of dust marks already in the print. A similar problem is caused by artifacts, blobbish areas of color caused by JPEG compression. For instance, if you take a close look at the sky in a JPEG photo, you may see lots of little distinct clumps of ...